Help, I Get Too Thin on a Raw Diet! Dr. Graham Responds

Video 1 of 7 Diving into reasons people say they can not succeed on an 80/10/10 diet, This time “I get too thin on a Raw Diet” with the author himself, Dr. Douglas Graham of FoodnSport.com

Partial Transcript, Watch the Whole Video for More!

We know there are extreme versions of very very thin people who think they’re very very fat, but for most of us, it’s not a problem. It’s just one of the facts of life that we don’t have a super great awareness of exactly what our body looks like and one of the reasons for that is because of skin. The skin makes it difficult to know what’s under the skin, that is it makes it difficult to tell what’s inside. We don’t know how much is bone and we don’t know how big the bones are we don’t know how much is muscle, we don’t have much as vessels and nerves and you know the plumbing, etc. A lot of people look at their body and figure that under the skin it’s just bones and muscle, but it’s not just bones and muscle, it’s bones and muscle and fat and all the other bits mentioned, all the vessels and organs and whatnot.

So when we lose body fat, which is a common occurrence on 80 10 10 if you’re carrying excess body fat to lose down to normal weight or down to normal body fat levels, the visual from the outside appears as if the muscles got smaller. In fact the muscle stayed the same size but the fat that’s inside the muscles, the fat that’s marbled through the muscles, the fat that surrounds the muscles, and the fat that’s outside of the muscles between the skin and the muscles, all of that gets reduced. The end result is that you have littler arms and littler legs and it looks like less muscle.

You may think “I get too thin on a Raw Diet” but in reality, you have just discovered you were under-muscled. The biochemistry from the doctors, the scientists, the sports scientists and everybody who’s ever studied what goes on in the body during weight loss during fat loss shows we’re not really losing muscle. What we’re being forced to deal with is the fact that we don’t carry as much muscle as we were giving ourselves credit for.

An important question to ask is, “do we need to carry more muscle in order to be stronger”?

The answer is No! In reality, more muscle makes us heavier and slower, yes it is an advantage to carry more muscle if you’re competing in bodybuilding or for some reason you want that look of more muscle and more size but there is there’s no sport that I’m aware of we’re having more muscle volume than required is an advantage. Having more muscle strength is an advantage that doesn’t always mean more muscle volume, although if you have very little muscle to start with adding both strength and volume can be of benefit up to a point. On the other hand, being slower is never an advantage in sports, it’s never an advantage to not be able to jump as high, and not being able to change direction is quickly not being able to get from A to B.

What happens if I didn’t want to lose weight when I went on 80/10/10 and I get too thin on a Raw Diet?

Now I’m discovering, oh my gosh I really don’t carry a lot of muscle mass… Well to start, the physique of humans isn’t designed to be super muscly. If we look at what different animals look like in nature, some of them are more like spiders and some of them are more like gorillas, but the human physique isn’t normally gorilla-like. We’re not typically getting really big, that’s not the nature of our efforts.  If we were in nature it wouldn’t be that we had to climb straight up walls, that we had to fight lions, that we needed explosive repetitive muscle-building movements, instead we’re in the rep range of endurance.

What we do involves a lot of steps, we have to walk from A to B we have to go five miles, that’s not what bodybuilders do. Bodybuilders train in a very specific rep range so if somebody wants to add muscle, it’s not about the diet it’s about the rep range. So have said, I get too thin on a Raw Diet and want to blow up your muscle size a little bit it’s easily done, you just have to do what bodybuilders do, train in the 15 to 35 reps range. If being stronger is more alluring, or more valuable to your sport, you can get stronger without really getting appreciably bigger by working out in the 2-6 rep range. Often times the 8-12 rep range is considered a mix of building muscle size and strength.  Dr. Graham has doubled his squat weight over the years for instance but weighs the same as he did when he started.

Check Out This Video on “Raw Vegan Powerlifting at 70”

with Dr. Douglas Graham to watch him qualify for the British Powerlifting Nationals!

There’s no diet where you’re eating enough calories of whole food that causes you or results in muscle loss, muscle loss happens from atrophy, disuse, from reductions in specific types of training yeah which is a modified version of atrophy disuse. Muscle loss happens in nerve-wasting conditions, if the nerves to the muscles suffer damage or waste away then the muscles will also waste away. No diet results in muscle loss, but in the case of 80/10/10 where you lose fat if you’re overweight and you might even lose fat if you’re underweight until you learn to eat enough fruit…

And this is the basic issue around “I get too thin on a Raw Diet”, which is learning to eat enough fruit!

This is because to a certain degree visually and physically we get trained to eat a certain volume of food, and when we switch from a very low water very low fiber standard Western diet or even a cooked vegan diet, to a raw vegan diet our volume goes way up. According to the professionals we need eight to twelve glasses of water per day, so if we add 8 to 12 glasses of water per day into our perception of how much volume we are supposed to eat every day and consider fruits and veggies can make up a large part of our water needs, we see the volume blows up dramatically in bites eaten but not volume. On the other hand on most standard western diets people are looking for more volume but the foods they choose are so calorie rich that they keep getting larger and larger.

With 80/10/10 it takes a little bit of practice to get to become better able to consume the volume required to gain or maintain your ideal body weight as well as to learn the caloric density of different foods. For instance, if I am really hungry will I feel better if I eat half a watermelon, or will I feel better if I get the same calories from 8 bananas? Be willing to give yourself a little practice at getting better at consuming more volume. If you want to Muscle Up do what bodybuilders do because invariably if I’m looking for bodybuilders I’m going to find them in the gym, not in the kitchen.

I hope you enjoy the video where we went much deeper into the topic of “I get too thin on a Raw Diet”!

This is just video 1 of 7 Diving into reasons people say they can not succeed on an 80/10/10 diet with Dr. Douglas Graham of FoodnSport.com

In 2006 Dr. Douglas Graham released “The 80/10/10 diet”, a book widely considered to be the raw food bible. His ability to take complex nutritional subjects and present them with just the right dose of common sense, humor, and science is unparalleled. A 40+ year raw foodist himself, trainer of elite athletes, fasting practitioner, keynote speaker, fitness instructor, and more, if you haven’t read the 80/10/10 diet I highly recommend it as the best book on diet and nutrition out there!

Get “The 80/10/10 Diet” here 

Subscribe to Dr. Grahams Youtube Channel, and his IG Here!

Check out “Simply Delicious 80/10/10 American Classics”

the Raw Recipe ebook I co-authored with Dr. Graham